I'm trying to install vmware serer 2.02 on a brand new Ubuntu 9.10 server machine. The VMWare server install package doesn't work out of the box, and needs patching - I've followed these instructions:

And everything seems to work OK. However, after a while, the vmware host interface crashes hard. This has been mentioned elsewhere:

but following those instructions doesn't fix the crash. What's more, when I try and restart the vmware services, I get a message that the vmware installation has not been configured yet (but it obviously has).

Right ow I'm not tied to vmware - I'd love to use virtualbiox, but I'm running this on a headless server, and the vboxweb project just isn't usable yet.

So, my question is:

Does anyone know what magic I need to perform to get vmware to not suck so much?

It seems that there's lots of problems running vmware 2 on ubuntu server 9.10 - will downgrading to an earlier version of ubuntu help? Is it worth the trouble?

Is there an alternative to VMWare? I've looked at virtualbox, which is awesome when run on a desktop machine, but I want to run it on a headless server and provide a web interface for controlling VMs. Xen might be an alternative, but is a pain to set up, and the interface for controlling machines is awful.

The main reason is that the hardware compatibility in ESXi is awful. For example, my NIC (Realtex RTL8168c) is not supported at all - I'd have to hack my own ESXi installer, which isn't really an option...
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ThomiDec 21 '09 at 11:35

However much I adore ESX I have to agree with you on this one, the HCL is very narrow - at least it stops my procurement team in their tracks when they want me to buy cheap servers right :)
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Chopper3Dec 21 '09 at 13:27

yeah - seems like the way to go would be to purchase an HP/branded server. It seems like VMWare target hardware on branded server builds.
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ThomiDec 22 '09 at 7:38